Sunday Downtime - All Evolve Media Sites are being migrated to a new data center Sunday Dec 11, 2016. The migration will occur during an 8 AM to 2 PM (Pacific Time) maintenance window. We will have up to 1 hour of downtime for any of our sites.

I believe the tree was painted by Shona Heath, the set designer he most commonly works with. She is responsible for the creation of some of the most fantastic and beautiful sets his photography is set amongst. I've always wondered what the creative process is ... do they come up with the ideas together? Or does he brainstorm the idea and she makes it for him? That tree painting is one of my most favourite Tim photos ever. That entire shoot was in an old Casa Vogue that is one of my most jealously guarded possessions. THank you for posting it ... x

Absolutely! it's delicious. You just want to buy an old crumbling villa and paint the walls.... I just found another Walker book! I Love Pictures! Tim Walker

The English fashion photographer Tim Walker, born in 1970 in Devon, has a fondness for such dream-logic scenarios. His models often occupy fantastical and elaborate sets whose baroque props rhyme with their costumes in subtle and sometimes wistful ways. Formerly assistant to photography legend Richard Avedon, and having made a name for himself in the pages of American, British, Italian and Japanese editions of Vogue, Walker is currently one of the world’s most influential fashion photographers. This volume is the first to present Walker’s complete works to date.

I must must must have his book.
He is one of the ONLY photographers that make me.....feel(?) something when I look at his pictures. They are so airy and almost relaxing and in trancing.
I love his work he does for Juicy (it actually makes Juicy's awful clothes look creative and interesting).

The photographer Tim Walker brings the imagination and beauty of Beaton and Parkinson to the pages of Vogue, albeit with a modern flavour. Robin Muir admires his fantasy landscapes, on show as part of a major retrospective at the Design Museum

At Vogue it all used to be so simple. When Tony Armstrong-Jones, as Lord Snowdon then was, went to the United States in 1958 at the dawn of jet-age travel, the fashion editor took 'me, a trunk of clothes and one model, Pagan Grigg. She did her own make-up and if we needed a man, her fiancé obliged. Not much fuss, really…'

'And lots of rabbits from Norfolk,' Sophie Baudrand, Vogue's fashion-budget supremo, recalls, 'special ones that didn't fornicate, supposedly…' In addition, Vogue bought a vintage Rolls-Royce - cheaper than risking damaging a hired one in a field. 'Fashion Pantomime' was one of Vogue's most expensive few days outdoors. 'I think I've mostly blocked it out,' Baudrand, good fairy to Walker's spendthrift pixie, says.

Though Tim Walker's shoots can be operatic in scale and ambition, matching an unrestrained imagination with a collection of preparatory sketches, it pays off. Not since Beaton in the 1930s or Parkinson in the 1950s have Vogue's pages sung so loudly. It is unlikely that any other fashion photographer would base a depiction of the season's couture on the disquieting children's book The Adventures of the Two Dutch Dolls (1895).

Walker, 37, loves, he says, turning 'funny daydreams into funny photographs,' adding that he lives much of the time 'in an imaginary world', a world rooted in real-life and memory, specifically the British countryside of his childhood: the manicured landscape of Surrey and the wilder downlands of Sussex and Dorset. He admits to a subscription to Country Life and 'a very happy childhood'. His days at Exeter Art College were happy, too, spent making for the camera 'crowns out of wheat and going round junk shops and making things in the kitchen. I liked to walk through the countryside with a camera and photograph the people I knew. When I had a camera there was always a reason to go somewhere.'

He had a few false starts. A work placement in Vogue's library found him cataloguing Beaton's negatives, the model of how not to catalogue a photographer's negatives, it must be said. But it allowed Walker to discover Beaton. An apprenticeship with Richard Avedon in New York reinforced an affection for the English landscape that grew more idealised the longer he stayed away. Avedon taught him a mantra he swears by: 'Rattle through it. Never think too much. Explain later.'

'I wasn't the best assistant,' he admits. In New York, all he really had to do was open up the studio, empty its waste-paper baskets and close it up at night. Invariably, hours later, Avedon would appear in his pyjamas clutching a baseball bat and crying out, 'Who's there? Who's there?' - the night air rent by the wail of another mis-set alarm.

But Walker's fate was probably sealed by another incident. Latterly, Avedon would sit cross-legged on the floor to direct his photographs, and regularly needed someone to hoist him up. Once - just once - Walker was in the line of fire: 'I pulled him up but then, for some reason, I let go too early and dropped him.' Avedon went 'ape****. In front of 40 people.' And back to England went Walker.

More than a decade later, Walker is celebrating with a retrospective at the Design Museum and book that he has painstakingly put together as a portfolio of his work. He follows in the line of the great Vogue masters; hopefully Avedon, Parkinson and Beaton would have recognised a kindred spirit and applauded the colour, the life and the fantasy brought once again to fashion photography.
'Tim Walker Pictures' in association with Jigsaw is at the Design Museum until September 7 (designmuseum.org). 'Pictures by Tim Walker' (teNeues) is available from Telegraph Books for £63 plus £1.25 p&p (0870-428 4112). A further selection will appear in next week's magazine

Lily Cole and the giant watering can, Eglingham Hall, Northumberland, England, 2004, Italian Vogue. Every photographer needs the firm hand of their agent to bring them down occasionally, crashing back into the real world of budgets and feasibility. Andrew Thomas is not one of those agents: 'Every season there comes a conversation with Tim on his ideas for upcoming stories. Tim is going to suspend a model on a giant hook; float a bathroom in the sea; paint various animals in pastel shades; attach a bed to the top of a classic car and then drive it; a roomful of rabbits; a tree in a house; a horse in a house. Then it dawns on you: how on earth is all of this going to be accomplished? Eventually, somehow, it all comes to fruition.'

Page from scrapbook 'Vogue Pantomime', 2004, British Vogue. The fashion editor Kate Phelan recalled that she 'went by the rule that anything went as long as it had a theatrical twist. I was free to go mad. This was not the shoot for the Little Black Dress.' There was little chance of that, Vogue agreed: 'Next to the clothes rails sat a grinning Cheshire cat, a wolf’s head, a giant squishy pumpkin, bags of wigs from the BBC costume department, fake silver armour, hats from the milliner Stephen Jones's archives and 20 tulle ballerina skirts.'

Sacha Pivovarova, Kizhi, Russia, 2006, British Vogue. Michelle Duguid, assistant on the shoot: 'Four generations of a family lived in this cramped house. We ended up unpacking the clothes in a room where four of the oldest members of the family slept, while Tim set up his tripod in an adjoining room surrounded by a further 17 staring members of the extended family. The two sisters sang us old Russian folk songs about the death of traditional country life, a subject close to our hosts' hearts. The singing moved Sacha to tears.' Here she is interrupted as she puts on a lace communion dress by Chanel.

__________________ And I am nothing of a builder, but here I dreamt I was an architect And I built this balustrade to keep you home, to keep you safe from the outside world